"I SIT AS GOD": AESTHETICISM AND REPENTANCE IN TENNYSON'S "THE PALACE OF ART"

The soul delights "all alone . . . to hear her echo'd song" (174-75), and has imagined that her "cycles of the human tale" (146) are "so wrought they will not fail" (148). If they are true indicators of human weakness and futility as well as aspiration and achievement, they must stand in truth. But the soul imagines much more, assuring a protective and immunizing function of art, an ivory tower superiority which cannot fail. But it does, and spectacularly. Immortal poets and wise men appear in portrait -Milton, Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Plato, Bacon - but they are at last decorations for a fine burial, stifling, enclosed, stagnant. Shaw posits: "If the soul were to become as immaculate and remote as these portraits, it would be dead; and a chill descends whenever we feel behind the poem Tennyson's desolate truth, that for the soul art has become not an affair of life and people, but a tomb" (58). Hughes argues that the poem "is about the possession, the hugging close to oneself, of art, not the process of creation" (87). But in fact both attitudes are undercut by Tennyson's analysis - the Palace becomes an airless trap, enclosed and stifling, but this same palace is also the product of puissant creativity, made on the spot. Creation here is motivated by arrogant self-sufficiency; the romantic trap of solipsism now closes on the speaker. Creativity itself can be corrupted, as C. S. Lewis notes in The Great Divorce: "Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to the love of the telling until, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him" (81).

Jordan argues that the expansive description which fills much of the poem was a flaw: "Formal containment was a problem: 'The Palace of Art' was a series of word-pictures which in spite of its neat quatrains had no necessary limits, no principle of exclusion" (33). But perhaps the medium is the message - an undisciplined mind, moving without constraints of commitment to extra-personal values, must be driven by its own insatiable and confused appetites. The scattered images in the palace really argue a tasteless eclecticism which can only reject whatever does not feed an egocentric pride. The palace's artifacts are, as in Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain," "jewels in joy designed/To ravish the sensuous mind," and like those on his sunken ship, they come to "lie lightless," "bleared and black and blind" (Ransom 42) in the dark morgue which the palace becomes.

The excessive display of undisciplined decoration offered by the aesthete soul in her palace argues vulgarity of purpose: "Most of the poem is detailed description of the art adorning the building, which sounds rather like Xanadu as constructed by the architect of the Crystal Palace" (Martin 163). As often happens, tastelessness issues in monstrous scale, witness the "huge crag-platform" (5), "ranged ramparts" (6), "royal-rich and wide" in size (20), a "spacious mansion" (234), with "long-sounding corridors" (53), all of which signals the sort of swelling intemperate expansiveness which produces the monstrous vulgarity of Las Vegas casinos. Richards finds "something corrupt in this widely eclectic taste," recalling the excesses of Browning's Bishop of St. Praxed. The past is to be "rifled and appropriated for self-indulgent delectation." He casts a sidelong shuddering glance at other such "treasure houses" as William Randolph Hearst's monstrous castle, the architectural and decorative muddle at San Simeon, half-seriously observing "Tennyson might have a lot to answer for" (207). The poet, of course, invites judgement of aesthetic excess.